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Wiki to PDF converter

Reshma 15:11, 23 May 2007 (EDT): At a panel discussion on use of wiki's in education at MIT yesterday, there were several comments from educators that while wiki's were great for collaboration, they aren't great for putting together proper reports. For example, they said that if a group of students start writing stuff up on a wiki, eventually they have to move everything to a Microsoft Word document in order to make a report that was submittable for the class assignment. My guess is that part of this sentiment is psychological ... since the wiki feels like a work in progress, users don't feel as much need to clean up errors and spelling mistakes. And part of this sentiment is the practical problem of it being hard to print out a wiki page and make it look "polished". Right now, since we can compose latex docs on the wiki that look "polished", it shouldn't be very difficult to write an extension that goes from wiki markup direct to a latex-generated PDF. It might be useful to be able to generate a "polished" version of a page.

Jason R. Kelly 18:05, 24 May 2007 (EDT): This would be especially valuable for the Reviews section. If you wanted to submit a review periodically for peer-review and publication in traditional journals then it would be nice to be able to dump it straight from the wiki.

Gel annotater

Jason R. Kelly 16:54, 16 May 2007 (EDT):Basically same technology that you use to tag images in facebook, but used to tag relevant lanes/bands on a gel or other image.

Sri Kosuri (talk) 19:09, 17 May 2007 (EDT): Doesn't seem very easy to use. I wonder if we could incorporate something like this into the site.

Tell user about this edit

Jasonk 08:46, 23 April 2007 (EDT): One of the more annoying things about the wiki is that when I post a reply to someone on a random talk page I don't know for sure that they will notice it. A lot of time I end up emailing them "I replied to your comment, follow this link", just to be sure. Would be nice to include a feature on the edit page that had a box to type in the username of anyone you wanted to get an email telling them about the edit. (would include a link, etc). People could opt out of receiving the emails in the their preferences, and the email itself could explain how -- so don't think it would bother people too much or anything.

Add protocol to my notebook

Could have a click feature on protocol pages that would automatically put a link to the protocol on a sub-page of the userpage like User:Jasonk/Protocols. This could also automatically add the protocol to the user's watchlist.

Down the road features that I would like

From Social Text, I learned of the possibility of emailing to a wiki. The personal wiki they set up for me by default allows me to email to the main page, or to email and automatically create new pages. They also have a "blog"-type page. When you create a blog, it gets it's own email address, and then when you send an email, it gets added to the top of the blog. I think it is set to only accept email from certain addresses. I have no clue how hard it would be to add this to OWW. It would help me in that I often have ideas or notebook entries that would be nice to quickly add without editing wiki text. I know that sounds lazy, but in general, the lower the barriers to editing the more stuff will get in.

I wrote the Wikilist extension with the idea of slowly integrating email with the wiki. Every page currently does have an email ID (e.g. Special:Wikilist/OpenWetWare:Ideas). If you go there, you can see the email address of a page (e.g. wikilist+SOMEID). Any emails to that address are sent to all users listed on the page (thus it acts like a mailing list). I've also thought about automatically posting the email to the discussion page of the target page. However, the main issue has been figuring out the right way to deal with authentication. Email is inherently unauthenticated. I guess checking the from address against the entire OWW database and then doing a lookup of the OWW user is possible. --Austin Che 16:41, 23 January 2007 (EST)

I hadn't thought about the spam or authentication problem. Your idea sounds good, but I guess it's still easy to fake a "from address" right? Maybe in the near term I should figure out an off-line solution (just send email to myself and then cut and paste when I have time). Thanks for your answers, Austin! And thanks for showing me that email extension, I will keep it in mind--Skoch3 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST)

Yes faking from addresses is trivial. If you are willing to (and your email client is capable of it), it would be possible and easy to implement a way for authentication to be passed in extra email headers. So you would have to add to every email to the wiki something of the form X-OpenWetWare-Password: Secret which would kind of authenticate you. Some mail clients let you do this trivially while I believe it's impossible with others, but I could possibly implement this and see who has use for it. --Austin Che 18:44, 23 January 2007 (EST)

I'd say hold off, since it's not clear anyone else needs it, and I am still learning. Thank you for thinking about this --Skoch3 21:37, 23 January 2007 (EST)

In the same vein as emailing to the wiki, I have a dream of being able to call and leave messages on the wiki. This is for when I am in my car and remember something. Of course, an actual voice recording would be a lot of data and too annoying to ever manually convert into text. So, one would want the wiki to have voice recognition software to convert the voicemail into a text notebook entry. Yes, I know this is a long way off!

This isn't that much harder than the email. The main thing is how are you going to specify a page name on your phone? Also, voice recognition really isn't that great. --Austin Che 16:41, 23 January 2007 (EST)

Yeah, I can see that the voice recognition wouldn't work too well. Maybe for this and the email idea above, a better solution is to handle these things "off the wiki" and then manually "dump" information into the right place via normal mechanisms. Actually I guess what I really want is an assistant who I can call. :) --Skoch3 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST)

OK, I know this idea is really tough too, but maybe there's work going on I don't know of. I am a user of evil microsoft products. I actually like Outlook and I suspect that since I will be doing email, I will also use the Outlook Calendar, and task list (to do). Would there be some way of "synching" outlook with a wiki? So that I could use the convenient way on Outlook of adding calendar events and task lists, but have it synched with public wiki pages? Some kind of wiki outlook plug in? OK, I know the market for that would be small. Synching with Outlook would then also make it easier to somehow add stuff to the wiki via a PDA--Skoch3 16:25, 23 January 2007 (EST)

Reshma 17:01, 23 January 2007 (EST): It is possible to view Google calendars on a wiki. See Endy:Victor3_plate_reader#Plate_reader_schedule for an example. So if you could get Outlook to sync with a Google calendar, then you could just display the Google calendar on a particular wiki page. That is the most straightforward way to do it right now (or at least the way that requires no new coding/functionality).

Very interesting, that looks like it would work for me, so I will look into it. Thank you!--Skoch3 17:04, 23 January 2007 (EST)

OWW journal clubs

--Vincent 05:58, 7 December 2006 (EST): Organizing a section of OWW where several journal clubs would be hosted (Computational Biology, Synthetic Biology, Lab Techniques in Microbiology ...) -- Has it been tried before ? Not at the lab level but with article discussions openly discussed by OWW users.

A given OWW journal club would have a focus on a defined area (use of categories), a place where people could suggest articles to be reviewed , and a selected article (voted every 2 weeks for example) being open for discussion through an open forum. It could be concluded by a conference call if people are motivated (more constraining to organize). It would be great to build a rich literature review that OWW could share and point to in the rest of the wiki.

Dear OWWers,
I started an online journal club page with a draft here: Journal Club. Have a look and extend at your leisure. So far it's only a static article review but with the excellent chat feature that was added recently. People could gather on a specific article page and really discuss world-wide. Jasu 09:41, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

OWW Short Course

Lon 13:33, 30 November 2006 (CST): Although there are protocol and course pages on OWW, both containing educational information and objectives, it might be good to have some more refined experiments. By this, I mean for newcomers to the biological sciences (new lab members, new labs) or those moving into new areas to have a set of standard experiments they could perform to establish good laboratory techniques and to be able to communicate problems with OWW members and/or their labmates. This could also be an alternative for lab instructors to use. This could be something like an updated and more encompassing Short Course in Microbial Genetics (or any another good lab manual).

Academic Job Openings

Jasonk 11:52, 10 November 2006 (EST): Came up at the last SC meeting, could have a place to post open post-doc positions, faculty, etc. Could also have corporate job postings, but that's probably already covered pretty well by Monster.com type websites.

Calendar with all scientific conferences

Jasonk 11:52, 10 November 2006 (EST): Suggested by Tom. This would be a calendar strictly for scientific conferences, since it's often tough to find out about conferences you might be interested in.

OWW Journals

Jasonk 01:50, 25 October 2006 (EDT): Based on conversations with Chris Surridge, our 2nd OWW Open Science Seminar series speaker, it looks like starting a journal may get much easier. The general idea is to use PLoS One as a commoditized peer-reviewing service. Articles that get through the PLoS One filter have been verified for publication-quality science, but have not been subjected to any subjective merit criteria (e.g. is this good enough for publication in Nature?) This is where OWW can come in, user groups on OWW could aggregate and "re-publish" open access (OA) content that has made it onto PLoS One (or any other OA journal). Basically, we would serve as an aggegator of articles that conform to some quality standard set by an editorial board from that community. An author published in the OWW Journal of Synthetic Biology could site their PLoS one reference as well as a 're-publication' reference. If the OWW Journal actually gained some clout, an author would probably simply list being published in the aggregator rather than the PLoS One reference, since it would carry more weight (e.g. the paper had to get over the merit quality bar -- "is this good enough for publication in OWW Journal of Synth Bio?"). a very high bar, indeed ;) Additionally, we could provide commentary on the papers that are of interest, "blog-esque" posts from notable community members, etc...

Jasonk 09:26, 6 October 2006 (EDT): Along the lines of adopt-a-protocol, it might be great to have adopt a topic area as well. Basically, trying to solve the problem of review articles always being out of date. It seems like the job of writing reviews would be much simpler if it was done on the fly as new papers came out. THat way when a new paper came accross your desk in the area you review you could read it, and then add the relevant details and the reference to the OWW Review page. This is in contrast to coming back to that same paper a year later when you're asked to write a review and having to re-read it, re-analyze it, etc. Seems like a win-win for the both the review-writer (less work) and the readers (who get a more up-to-date source.)

Adopt-a-protocol

Page Authorship

Jasonk 22:57, 8 August 2006 (EDT): There might be a benefit to having the option to lock in an "author" at the time of page creation. We could limit this to pages with a namespace in front of them (e.g. 'Endy:foo'), to prevent someone from locking down a 'shared area' page like DNA ligation. Other people could edit the page, but there would be an official author -- that means the author would have the benefit of getting credit for the content of the page (e.g. perhaps when you hit cite this page, only the offical author would come up), but also be saddled with ensuring some level of quality (whatever they were comfortable attaching their name to). This might help enable some downstream OWW applications, like providing real scientific attribution for OWW contributions or for publishing results, etc. I suspect that assigning a page an official authorship would be the exception rather than the rule, but might be a useful option to have -- just something to think about longer term, wanted to write it down.

Sidebar

Jasonk 16:38, 27 July 2006 (EDT):The customize sidebar extension is great, but I don't think any new user would notice it. Maybe at the bottom of the side bar we should include a link be default that says update my sidebar and would take the user to a pregenerated sidebar page for them with comments on how to change it. once they figured it out they could remove the link themselves from their sidebar if they don't want it there.

Navigation

--Johncumbers 16:38, 16 July 2006 (EDT): A big problem I've found with OWW, and I'd like to see if anyone else has the same problem. I can't stay logged in, e.g Flickr, Amazon retains who I am, but OWW doesn't. Is this just me? This leads to the seconds part of the problem. When I go to log-in, it always returns me the link to go back to the main page, I then have to use the back button to go back to the page I want to edit. These are not huge problems, but they really confuse new people that I introduce to the site. They find it really frustrating to navigate at the beginning. Anyone else found this when trying to introduce new people to OWW/Mediawiki?

Smeister 07:38, 17 July 2006 (EDT) OWW keeps me logged in unless I log in from another computer - in that case I get logged out from the first. Are you maybe sharing your account? I assume you do not have any cookie setting problems since Flickr etc works for you...

Jasonk 09:25, 17 July 2006 (EDT): I stay logged in as well normally... However, to avoid getting linked back to the main page, use the link at the top right corner to log in - it will then offer a link back to the page you were coming from, rather than a link to the Main Page (I agree it is annoying when it links to the Main Page).

Austin 13:59, 17 July 2006 (EDT): On one computer, I can't stay logged in. On another, I always stay logged in. I've not been able to figure out the cause.

Skoch3 16:14, 23 January 2007 (EST): I always seem to have to re-log in. I use one computer, but it's a laptop with a lot of different IP addresses during the day I think. It seems I have to log in to my private wiki more often than the public, but not sure. I have been assuming that it was just some quirk between the private wiki log on and the OWW.

Page watch function

Smeister 08:20, 17 July 2006 (EDT) I love the "watch page" function and would like to organize more activities in the lab, taking advantage of it. However, there is no way of knowing who in the lab is watching a page at any moment. You basically never know if anybody is paying attention at all. Would a query page for this be very hard to incorporate? It sure would enhance overall transparency and I guess it would also be useful for some of these OWW discussion pages...

--Johncumbers 13:14, 17 July 2006 (EDT) I agree, I don't use the page watch as much as I'd like. I like you ridea Steven, It would be also nice if it had a little number like 'my watchlist(44)' to let you know what's inside there each day and encourage you to click on it.

Comment button

--Johncumbers 13:14, 17 July 2006 (EDT) could the signature button be changed to include the * and ''' that we put in for comments. Another idea would be a protocol notes button that creates a note link for a protocol. Currently if you want to add a note to a protocol, you have to either put it at the bottom, it would be better if it created a link within the page without you having to type it all out. e.g if the protocol is located at Protocols:Drosophila/chip on chip then when I post a note, it automatically creates a link to Protocols:Drosophila/chip on chip/note1 without me having to do it. get the idea?